Democracy

MITT ROMNEY’S campaign site has a simple statement of principle at the top: “We have a moral responsibility not to spend more than we take in.” If Mr Romney actually believes this, he must think America a thoroughly depraved and immoral country. The US government has spent more than it has taken in for 76 of the past 100 years, and 26 of the past 30. The last five Republican presidents, Messrs Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush and Bush, have all violated this putative moral responsibility with joyful abandon, and they have plenty of company. There are almost no countries in the world whose governments spend, on the whole, less than they take in; the ones that come close to breaking even are mostly oil-rich authoritarian plutocracies or theocracies (Kazakhstan, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and so forth; Chile and Estonia are the sole democracies with public debts under 10% of GDP). Most countries with very low public debts are in that position not because they are thrifty or responsible, but because they are so corrupt, poor or unstable that no one will lend them money. North Korea, as far as anyone can tell, has virtually no national debt at all, but is obviously not doing well by its future generations. The world’s wealthy, happy democracies, meanwhile, from Sweden to Israel to America to Japan, almost all maintain national debts of upwards of 30% of GDP, meaning they usually spend more than they take in. I would be interested to hear Mr Romney’s explanation for this.

If he wins the election, Mr Romney, by his own account, has no intention of fulfilling any moral responsibility the government might have not to spend more than it takes in. Mr Romney has endorsed Paul Ryan’s proposed budget, whose chief feature is a quick burst of massive tax cuts that will dramatically increase the federal deficit, compensated for by notional spending cuts which he largely refuses to specify. This budget would, according to Mr Ryan’s own highly favourable estimates, still be running a $287 billion annual deficit in 2022, and would not come into balance until 2040, when Mr Romney will be 93. If Mr Romney does actually consider it a “moral responsibility” for the government not to spend more than it takes in, it must be the sort of moral responsibility you pay lip service to, but expect to go on violating in practice every day of your life, like the responsibility to love your neighbour as yourself.

I can’t pretend to know whether Mr Romney actually believes in this ridiculous slogan, or whether he is simply plastering it on his website because he knows that it sounds appealing to many people whose ideas about the way economies work are simplistic. It would be easy enough to change the slogan into an accurate one: simply add the words “too much”. “We have a moral responsibility not to spend too muchmore than we take in”: that’s true. But the entire argument is about how much is “too much”, and what kinds of trade-offs you make by failing to spend more than you take in right now, as opposed to later, depending on the circumstances. That’s not the kind of statement you can put on your campaign website, because everyone would agree with it, including your opponent, and you’d get bogged down in technical arguments. My best guess is that Mr Romney is perfectly aware that his slogan, as stated, isn’t really true, but is willing to stand behind it because in the context of the presidential campaign, it serves as a signaling device to voters on various issues. Indeed, the slogan as used here is actually a link to a section of Mr Romney’s website calling for “Smaller, Smarter, Simpler Government“. This isn’t a call for cutting the deficit at all. It’s a call for reducing the size of government, which only cuts the deficit if you don’t slash taxes at the same time, which would be fine except that Mr Romney is planning to slash taxes.

This brings me to the point of this post, which I’ve been a long time getting to. It is this: As we watch the presidential campaigns, how much effort do we put into critiquing what the candidates actually stand for or are likely to do, and how much do we put into critiquing the stuff they put out in their propaganda? For example, yesterday my colleague rightly agreed with many conservative commentators that the Obama administration’s “Julia” web cartoon is, considered as an ad campaign, pretty lame. Then he took it a step further: he argued that when conservative commentators slam the cartoon for sketching a vision of a society in which citizens’ lives are shaped by government policies from cradle to grave, they’re just complaining about the reality of American society, as it would be under any administration, Democratic or Republican. Right. I don’t agree that the differences between the Democratic and Republican visions for America in the 2010s aren’t significant. But clearly the problem with the Julia cartoon can’t be that it described the existence of Head Start, Pell grants, health-insurance regulations, and so forth, all of which will continue to exist under Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, if at different levels of funding.

Fundamentally, I think the Julia cartoon and Mr Romney’s declaration that budget deficits are by nature immoral are both responses to the same campaign imperative: the difficulty of representing complex arguments over policy in terms that average voters can get their heads around. The Julia cartoon fell prey to a problem that always haunts Democrats: the “laundry-list of programmes” trap, in which liberals see lots of different social problems, try to address them in different ways (which is, after all, a better way to deal with complex and multifarious social problems than one-size-fits-all systems that don’t address many situations), and end up confusing and exhausting the voters. Mr Romney’s slogan employs a classic Republican approach: hold out a simple, sweeping principle that voters understand and embrace, even if you don’t actually believe in it yourself because it wouldn’t really be a good idea. In the long run, the repetition of these bogus principles by political leaders rots the timbers of the body poiltic, but in the near term it’ll probably be okay, because most likely nobody will be able to implement them.

(Photo credit: AFP)

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ACCORDING to the internet’s hilarious headline writers, Eduardo Saverin, a Facebook co-founder, dis-”likes” America’s tax rules and has “un-friended” the land of the free in order to dodge a potentially monumental tax bill after Facebook goes public. Mr Saverin is Brazilian by birth, but has been an American citizen since 1998. Last fall, he filed the papers to renounce his American citizenship. Considering how well Mr Saverin has done here, is this jake?Farhad Manjoothinks that not only is Mr Saverin’s extreme self-deportation unfair, “Itas ungrateful and itas indecent. Saverinas decision to decamp the U.S. suggests heas got no idea how much America has helped him out.”Ilyse Hogue of The Nationis incensed:

In making this decision, the Brazilian native did more than expose his blind disregard for all that his adopted country has done for him. He has made himself the poster child for the callous class of 1 percenters who are all too happy to use national resources to enrich themselves, and then skate, or cry foul, when asked to pay their fair share. The story evokes the image of the marauding aliens from the movie Independence Day, who come to Earth to take what they can get before moving on to another planet.

Wait a second! Did Eduardo Saverin plunder us? Are we now a desolate husk of a country, sucked dry by Eduardo Saverin’s rapine? Well, no. Facebook created wealth. Mr Saverin is leaving having deployed his capital in a manner that made America better off than it was when he arrived. But will he escape without rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s? Well, no. Both Mr Manjoo and Ms Hogue mumble in passing under their breath while coughing that Mr Saverin will have to pony up an “exit tax”. So what’s this woefully insufficient tribute come to, such that Mr Saverin may be so bitterly denounced for exploitation and despoilment?According toDanielle Kucera, Sanat Vallikappen and Christine Harper of Bloomberg:

Saverin wonat escape all U.S. taxes. Americans who give up their citizenship owe what is effectively an exit tax on the capital gains from their stock holdings, even if they donat sell the shares, said Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, director of the international tax program at the University of Michiganas law school. For tax purposes, the IRS treats the stock as if it has been sold.

Got that? Mr Saverin’s on the hook for the amount his capital-gains tax would have come to had he sold all his American stock holdings. Tim Worstall sketches it out on his napkin:

[T]he net effect of his citizenship renunciation on his immediate tax bill is to increase it, hugely. For it will, at minimum, start with the idea that heas just made a $3.5 billion or so profit (adjusted downwards for the difference between the private market value of Facebook last fall and the IPO price) on his Facebook stock which he got originally for minimal amounts of money. At the standard 15% long term capital gains rate thatas near $500 million right there.

Half a billion dollars! That is not scot-free. Did the marauding aliens in “Independence Day” leave behind a half billion American dollars after having successfully invested in Earth? They did not! One wonders how many pounds of flesh Mr Manjoo and Ms Hogue think Mr Saverin owes for the privilege of having Uncle Sam’s hooks out once and for all.

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IN MOST opinion polls, Americans appear reluctant to cut defence spending. Of course, in most opinion polls Americans appear reluctant to cut everything apart from foreign aid. Despite all of the hand-wringing over the federal budget, the truth is most people don’t have a firm grasp of how their money is spent.So the Program for Public Consultation (PPC), in collaboration with the Stimson Center and the Center for Public Integrity (CPI), tried to educate a group of Americans on one aspect of the budget. Last month they showed a representative sample of Americans the size of the defence budget from different viewpoints and presented them with arguments for and against cutting funds. The idea was to simulate a congressional debate; to put participants in the shoes of those actually voting on the budget.

Then they asked each member of the group how they would handle the defence budget if they were a member of Congress.They found

Presented the base national defense budget for 2012 and given the opportunity to set a level for 2013, three quarters reduced it, including two thirds of Republicans and 9 in 10 Democrats. On average defense spending was lowered 23%. A majority lowered it at least 11%.

When participants were asked to get more specific and propose changes to the levels of spending in nine areas, a majority cut all nine. “All areas combined were cut 18% on average, with Republicans cutting 12% and Democrats 22%,” the study notes.Most participants were surprised by the level of America’s defence spending when it was held up against the rest of the discretionary budget, historical levels of spending, and the defence spending of other nations. A previous poll showed similar resultsasupport for defence cutsawhen participants were informed about the comparable size of the 31 largest categories in the federal discretionary budget.

The potential cuts to the Pentagon contained in last year’s budget deal are actually less than those proposed by the PPC study group on average.So it may seem odd that America’s politicians are now scrambling to avoid those reductions.Instead, Republicans have proposed cuts to food stamps, Medicaid, social services and other programmes for poor Americans, while Democrats have proposed raising taxes on the rich. Few have pushed back against the military spendthrifts, who argue thatAmerica would swiftly decline were it to return to the level of funding George Bush laboured under at the end of his peaceable presidency.

I’m not sure if this means we need to educate our congressmen, or simply stop listening to them. It probably doesn’t matter. AsR. Jeffrey Smith, an editor at CPI, tells Suzy Khimm, the debate over the defence budget is one in whichthe anoisy minoritiesa dominate. And whileknowledge is a powerful weapon, fear mongering is often more effective.

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IT’S a testament to the power of internet remix culture that I saw at least three parodies of “The Life of Julia“, an online slideshow from Barack Obama’s campaign, before I glimpsed the original. In the official version, we are shown Julia advancing through the stations of life, from girlhood to retirement, and told at each stage just how well she fares under Mr Obama’s policies compared to Mr Romney’s.

Looking at the real deal for the first time just now, and attempting to put out of mind the spoofs and criticisms I’ve already absorbed, my first impression is that there is something either metaphysically or politically queer going on. Barack Obama is president Julia’s entire life! My second impression, after slapping the shackles on my hair-splitting inner stickler, is that it was really quite generous of Mr Obama’s people not to admit outright the truth that Julia probably won’t survive past 30 in the terrifying alternative universe in which Mitt Romney is eternally president, for in that timeline her heart is torn out and eaten by a roving band of cannibal savages in the aftermath of the global nuclear devastation precipitated by Mr Romney, who doesn’t even have a Nobel peace prize. That is to say, my first impression was that “The Life of Julia” is completely ridiculous, even as a piece of propaganda, and I was immediately moved to satirise it. I guess that’s why there are so many send-ups. David Burge at Iowahawk, I think quite accurately captures the flavour of the original’s description of Julia’s political alternatives, whatever you think of his politics.

Ross Douthat goes beyond the observation that “The Life of Julia” is a risible piece of propaganda. He argues that “the slide show represents a monument to certain trends in contemporary liberalism” due to the “fascinating ideological purity [of] its attitudes and arguments”. “On the one hand”, Mr Douthat writes, “its public policy agenda is essentially a defense of existing arrangements no matter their effectiveness or sustainability, apparently premised on the assumption that American women canat make cost-benefit calculations or indeed do basic math”. But here’s Mr Douthat’s deeper critique:

At the same time, the slide showas vision of the individualas relationship to the state seems designed to vindicate every conservative critique of the Obama-era Democratic Party. The liberalism of athe Life of Juliaa doesnat envision government spending the way an older liberalism didaas a backstop for otherwise self-sufficient working families, providing insurance against job loss, decrepitude and catastrophic illness. It offers a more sweeping vision of governmentas place in society, in which the individual depends on the state at every stage of life, and no decisionapersonal, educational, entrepreneurial, sexualacan be contemplated without the promise that it will be somehow subsidized by Washington.

This seems a bit too heavy to lay upon a cartoon slide-show intended simply to illustrate the difference between a few of Mr Obama’s and Mr Romney’s policies. Is Mr Douthat disappointed that there are no slides depicting Julia sniffing the crisp fall breeze, attending a pot-luck at a family reunion, backpacking through the Andes, kneeling at her bedside in prayer, or engaged in other mostly government-free activities? But Messrs Romney and Obama are seeking a government office. Mr Douthat grumbles that Julia “seems to have no meaningful relationships apart from her bond with the Obama White House”. Now that I think of it, I cannot recall ever seeing a soldier eat nachos in an Army recruitment advert. Does the Army mean to suggest soldiers don’t eat nachos? Lies!

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THOSE who complain that Mitt Romney’s privilege has left him insensitive to the workaday problems of the common man fail to consider that the man has apparently struggled for his whole life with the curse of awful timing. There he was Saturday, just days after Barack Obama was garlanded with praise for his surprise endorsement of gay marriage, giving a commencement address at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. That must have been about the last place a candidate would want to turn up if he was hoping to gently waffle about his views on social issues, as Mr Romney has been wont to do.

The speech was an effort by Mr Romney, a Mormon, to bolster relations with non-Mormon Christians (or, to be precise, that subset of Christians who represent the “religious right”aas Timothy Noah aptly pointed out in March, the category of “Christian”encompasses nearly 80% of Americans). Polls show that a considerable number of people profess to be leery of voting for a Mormon; the wariness is especially pronounced among self-identified evangelical Christians, a demographic that has heavily favoured Republicans in recent elections.

This is actually the second major address Mr Romney has given on the subject of his religion. In 2007, while campaigning for the Republican nomination, he offered a speech that explicitly referenced John F. Kennedy’s 1960 address on his Catholicism. In that speech, Mr Romney, like JFK before him, sought to reassure voters who were worried about electing a president whose religion includes a strong, centralised, earthly authority: “Let me assure you that no authorities of my church, or of any other church for that matter, will ever exert influence on presidential decisions.”

The fact that Mr Romney became the nominee this year might be taken as evidence that concern about his religion has faded. This time around, Mr Romney focused on voters who were suspicious of Mormonism’s beliefs rather than its governing structure. “People of different faiths, like yours and mine, sometimes wonder where we can meet in common purpose, when there are so many differences in creed and theology,” he said. “Surely the answer is that we can meet in service, in shared moral convictions about our nation stemming from a common worldview.”

Evangelical leaders applauded the speech. More generally, as Brad Knickerbocker notes at the Christian Science Monitor, Mr Romney’s overall outreach effort has been “apparently successful”.Sceptical though they may be of a Mormon, there are bigger bogeymen. I think back to Richard Land, the head of the Southern Baptist Convention, chuckling at an appearance at the National Press Club in DC last autumn, explaining that nothing unites evangelicals like Barack Obama. If values voters were going to undo Mr Romney, they were going to do it in the primary.

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BARACK OBAMA took cubic miles of guff for spending the last few years insisting his position on gay marriage was “evolving”. Now he’s finally come out and said what everybody knew he was eventually going to say: he thinks gay people should be allowed to marry the partner of their choice. This puts Mr Obama back in the locomotive of the train of civil rights for gay people, which is where the Democratic Party wants him to be. It’s hard to fault him for making the move, on either political or moral grounds.

But it’s probably bad for the cause of gay marriage. Until today, the issue had only a moderate partisan cast. Officially, the Republican Party was opposed to gay marriage, and conservatives quickly responded to Mr Obama’s declaration by reaffirming their opposition. But the issue didn’t have a high profile, and many Republicans of a more libertarian slant on social issues were steadily coming to the conclusion in recent years that there was no reason why gays shouldn’t get married just like anybody else can.

As of today, gay marriage is once again a partisan issue at the heart of a presidential election campaign. Many Republicans who might have had flexible opinions as of yesterday are now going to find themselves psychologically inclined to move towards the party line. Mitt Romney will be forced, within the next hours or days, to come out with a full-throated argument against gay marriage. Republican office-holders will have to vocally support that position. Republican media outfits (Fox News, conservative talk radio, RedState and so forth) will have to join the attack. Millions of GOP voters who otherwise might have gradually reconciled themselves to gay marriage within the next few months will be held back by the ideological alignments created in this presidential campaign.

The announcement is almost certain to help, not hurt, Mr Obama’s re-election effort. Those who are radicalised against gay marriage by this announcement weren’t going to vote for Mr Obama anyway; they are Republican voters who might have been on the fence about gay marriage. Almost no Democratic-leaning voters will switch or withhold their votes over this announcement. But many Democrats will be enthused to see Mr Obama take leadership on an issue of moral consequence in which they fervently believe. Voter turnout will rise; the tone of support for Mr Obama will become more emphatic. There will be a stronger sense that Mr Obama stands for a vision of America profoundly different from that of Mr Romney. The move may help re-elect a president who supports gay marriage. But my feeling is that it will delay the moment when support for the right of gays to marry becomes a widespread American consensus.

(Photo credit: AFP)

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UNLIKE colleagues such as Bob Bennett, a senator from Utah unceremoniously dumped by the Republican Party in 2010, Dick Lugar was not caught off guard. He had known for well over a year that he would face a strong, tea-party backed rival in the primary for the Senate seat he has held for the past 35 years. He planned accordingly, voting more conservatively, amassing a large war-chest and cranking up his get-out-the-vote operation. Nonetheless, yesterday Mr Lugar lost the primary by a whopping 20-point margin, to Richard Mourdock, Indianaas state treasurer and a hero to many tea-partiers.

Politicians from both parties had described the race as a test of the tea partyas strength. As the candidate himself puts it, aRumours of the death of the tea party have been exaggerated.a Jackie Bodnar, of Freedom Works, a campaign outfit that supports tea-party groups, says his victory will give impetus to tea-party candidates seeking the Republican nomination for Senate seats in Florida, Texas and Utah, among other races. Moreover, Mr Lugaras defeat, says Theda Skocpol, of Harvard, awill send another shudder through the Republican ranks in Congressa.

Those who thought the tea-party movement was wilting after helping to propel Republicans to a thumping victory in the mid-term elections of 2010, Mr Mourdock argues, were simply mistaking evolution for disillusion. Randy Harrison, the founder of the Hancock County tea party, bears this narrative out. At first, he says, awe were just a bunch of people getting together and griping.a Over time, his group began to engage more formally in local politics. They have familiarised themselves withaand objected toathe county governmentas scheme for local improvements. They have invited Republican and Democratic candidates to speak at their meetings (no Democrats have ever accepted), and endorsed some of them, including Mr Mourdock. Several members are now running for local office.

Of the 900-odd tea-party groups Ms Skocpol has been tracking around the country, some 600 remain activeaa remarkable proportion, she argues, for a maturing protest movement. Tea-party activists, in her experience, display aunusual doggednessa. Mr Harrison agrees. His members are frustrated by Congressas failure to enact the tea-party agenda, from fierce budget cuts to a repeal of health-care reform. But that failure has only caused them to become more meticulous in their approach to politics, he says. They realise it will take several election cycles to install conservative Republicans in enough offices to bring about the change they seek.

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THE New York Times ought to read this blog more often. In an editorial published today the paper reacts to the increasingly vocal support for gay marriage in the president’s cabinet. It notes that Joe Biden and Arne Duncan recently came out in favour of gay marriage and says, “That made it even harder to figure out what Mr. Obama and his political handlers think is gained by the presidentas hedging.”

Allow me to help. In an earlier post, my colleague summed up the perils of an endorsement by Mr Obama. “Whatever the moral valence of the issue was before the president speaks, it shifts dramatically along partisan axes as soon as he takes a position,” he wrote. In other words, were Mr Obama to embrace gay marriage, he might animate the opposition and retard progress towards greater acceptance. That is one argument, anyway. While Gallup reports more good news in its latest poll on the issue (majority support, again), public support has slipped after spikes in the past.

The interesting thing about the current debate over Mr Obama’s position is that a good number of his supporters (though certainly not all) are comfortable with his hedge. Browsing the popular comments on another Times piece, I was struck by the amount of patience most readers showed with Mr Obama’s caginess. They are confident that his motivations are noble,and believe that his support for gay marriage is real if not vocalised. So they are willing to wait for his second term, which they think will be more attainable if he is allowed to stay his hand.

This implicit trust in Mr Obama’s core beliefs is an advantage the president has over Mitt Romney, whose principles are so opaque that he has had to make over-the-top pronouncements on issues that he might rather avoid.Mr Romney cannot hedge because he has already evolved too many times, on too many issues, in ways that are too convenient.Whereas a more reliably conservative candidate could dodge an issue like gay marriage, Mr Romney must not,lest he sow doubt in his conservative base. So the lesson for you young aspiring politicians out there is that having some principles is a good thing because it allows you to be a little less principled when it’s politically advantageous.

(Photo credit: AFP)

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JUST up the street from me at the moment, on the corner of the Bernauerstrasse, is a massive photo-mural depicting the same street corner on an August day in 1961: a snapshot of Hans Conrad Schumann, an East German soldier, hurdling the barbed wire on top of the still-under-construction Berlin Wall to get to the West, and freedom. In those days, the stakes that led communist regimes to construct obstacles to emigration were clear: they were afraid that combined envy of the West’s prosperity and, to a lesser extent, its intellectual and religious freedom would lead huge masses of their citizens to flee abroad. That, obviously, is not an anxiety that affects today’s Chinese Communist regime. The fact that China does not fear that any sign of openness will lead large numbers of its citizens to emigrate is one background factor behind Beijing’s apparent willingness to reach a face-saving agreement to allow dissident lawyer Chen Guangcheng to apply to “study” in the United States.

The thing that has surprised me from the beginning of the drama is that it could possibly take place. We still don’t know how Mr Chen managed to get from his village to the American embassy, but it seems extraordinary that the Chinese could have allowed a high-profile dissident to escape, could have lost track of him after his escape, or could have allowed him to approach the embassy to ask for asylum. On a couple of occasions during the time I spent in Vietnam, dissidents made surprise, unauthorised contact with American personnel at the embassy or ambassador’s residence, but secret police stationed on the street nearby intervened extremely rapidly. In general, police seemed to know beforehand when dissidents were likely to stage such moves. That knowledge turned the relationship between dissidents, the regime, and the US government into a sort of choreographed dance, with limits drawn and signals sent based on mutual interest in avoiding embarrassment over declared positions. So it’s not surprising that the result of the Chen Guangcheng drama looks likely to be one that allows America to maintain it has been true to its commitment to defending freedom of conscience, and also allows China to maintain it has not allowed Mr Chen to flee and claim political asylum.

That’s not that different from the way things operated in the old days. The relationship between communist states and America around dissidents has always been a bit of a dance. What’s changed is that America’s interest in protecting dissidents is no longer a matter of either economic or strategic self-interest. China is not a military foe, or an enemy of capitalism; it’s our largest trading partner. And now I’m going to go out on a limb and say something rather gushy and perhaps obnoxiously self-congratulatory: The fact that China is not our enemy makes our continued commitment to defending freedom of conscience for Chinese citizens all the more laudable. We really have nothing to gain from protecting Chen Guangcheng, except that it lets us give ourselves a pat on the back and walk down the street feeling all free and democratic. So let’s! Sure, as William Dobson points out, China is probably just as interested in getting rid of Mr Chen as we are in protecting him. And sure, immigrants these days tend to come more because they’re tired, poor and hungry than because they’re yearning to breathe free, and Chinese citizens these days are less interested in coming to America precisely because the path to middle-class security probably leads through Guangdong rather than Los Angeles. Still, when that rare individual comes along who really considers the freedom thing more important than the wealth thing, we apparently still feel honour-bound to do something for him. And that’s a nice thing.

(Photo credit: AFP)

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ON MONDAY the top EPA official for the South and south-west resigned because of outrage on the part of some Christians that, two years ago, he had stated he intended to “crucify” oil companies that violate the law. This resignation makes it all the more outrageous that so few have seen fit to express outrage at the outrageous remarks made by Ted Nugent earlier this week to the Associated Press. Mr Nugent said his prosecution in a US district court for illegally transporting a black bear he had killed across state lines was a “witch-hunt” by federal officials angered at his claims that the government is planning to take his guns away.

Coming just days before the Walpurgisnacht celebrations of April 30th, Mr Nugent’s comments are infuriating, ignorant and egregiously offensive to witches everywhere, and their families. Anyone who has endorsed or defended Mr Nugent must publicly distance themselves from him and his comments, which are insensitive to the point of bigotry.

My views on this subject may be slightly influenced by the fact that I’ve spent the past couple of days in Germany’s Harz Mountains, where witches and Walpurgisnacht are a big deal. Nevertheless, it seems clear that Mr Nugent’s comparison of his own prosecution on grounds he admits are legitimate to the genocidal persecutions suffered by witches throughout Europe and America up until the 20th century is unacceptable. Has Mr Nugent been burnt alive on the uncorroborated testimony of a 16-year-old girl? Has he been interrogated with the hot tongs? Has he been broken on the rack? I think not. And I hope that America has not become the sort of country where arguably prominent people can use common figures of speech that members of certain religious denominations might deem offensive, without having all presidential candidates publicly denounce them by name. What kind of America would that be?

(Photo credit: AFP)

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STEPHEN KING is the world’s bestselling horror novelist. Somewhat to my surprise, he also has strong opinions about tax policy, which he lays out in salty language in the Daily Beast. Mr King, who is extremely rich, wants his tax rate to rise. Why not cut a personal check to the IRS, then? Here’s what Mr King has to say about that:

Cut a check and shut up, they said.

If you want to pay more, pay more, they said.

Tired of hearing about it, they said.

Tough shit for you guys, because Iam not tired of talking about it. Iave known rich people, and why not, since Iam one of them? The majority would rather douse their dicks with lighter fluid, strike a match, and dance around singing aDisco Infernoa than pay one more cent in taxes to Uncle Sugar.Itas true that some rich folks put at least some of their tax savings into charitable contributions. …All fine as far as it goes, but it doesnat go far enough.

What charitable 1 percenters canat do is assume responsibilityaAmericaas national responsibilities: the care of its sick and its poor, the education of its young, the repair of its failing infrastructure, the repayment of its staggering war debts. Charity from the rich canat fix global warming or lower the price of gasoline by one single red penny. That kind of salvation does not come from Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Ballmer saying, aOK, Iall write a $2 million bonus check to the IRS.a That annoying responsibility stuff comes from three words that are anathema to the Tea Partiers: United American citizenry.

But those $2m bonus checks would help, wouldn’t they? So why not go ahead and do it?Mr King is frank:

And what [rich people] do give away isalike the monies my wife and I donateatotally at their own discretion. Thatas the rich-guy philosophy in a nutshell: donat tell us how to use our money; weall tell you.

But gifts to the government may be earmarked for specific purposes. The rich can tell the government how to use their money. Deficit-reduction, infrastructure, education, health care, poor relief: take your pick. So go ahead! Why not?

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A COUPLE of weeks ago Dan Savage, a columnist and activist perhaps best known for making Rick Santorum hate Google and for trying to comfort bullied gay teens, gave the right a gift. At a high-school journalism convention, he attacked Bible-backed anti-gay bigotry. He pointed out that the Bible does indeed condemn homosexuality, but it also endorses slavery. “We can learn to ignore the bullshit in the Bible about gay people,” he said, “the same way we learned to ignore the bullshit in the Bible about shellfish, about slavery, about dinner, about farming, about menstruation, about masturbation…We ignore bullshit in the Bible about all sorts of things.” During this portion of his speech some students walked out. When he moved on to another topic, he said, “You can tell the Bible guys in the hall to come back now because I’m done beating up the Bible. It’s funny to someone who is on the receiving end of beatings justified by the Bible how pansy-assed people react when you push back.”

Mr Savage was making one valid point and one sloppy one. The former: people who justify anti-gay bigotry by brandishing a Bible but ignore other, less convenient biblical prohibitions (the list might also include mixed fabrics and divorce) are hypocrites. The latter: people quick to condemn ought not to be so quick to take offence. The problem with the latter point is that however true it is in the abstract, it was not necessarily true in the particular. No evidence exists that the students who walked out ever condemned or bullied anyone. However poorly Mr Savage may have been treated in high school, it was not by the students in the audience, and they deserved more from a famous and accomplished journalist than derision. Mr Savage acknowledged as much when he apologised, both for the regrettable and infantile slur “pansy-assed” and for using what the great J. Anthony Lukas called “a barnyard epithet” to refer to the Bible. (He could, of course, have opted to make a broader point: that nobody should be so quick to take offence; that journalists will hear a lot of things over the course of a career that they find offensive and even hurtful, and walking out anytime that happens will result in a short career and a narrow mind; that, however ugly his language Mr Savage was at least advancing arguments, and that surely at least one of those offended souls hoping to make a life out of words could have found a few to hurl back at him rather than just flouncing out in a huff.)

Mr Savage’s apology did not stop the outrage machine. Some seem to have taken particular delight in hurling Mr Savage’s epithetsabully and basher (of Christians and Christianity, rather than gays)aback at him. The American Thinker harrumphs, “Evidently, bullying is one of those things that is defined by the ‘victim’.” Well, yes: in fact it is. Bullying is the strong picking on the weak, not the other way around (the other way around is satire). One could make the argument that in the case of Mr Savage’s speech, he was the strong one, and the high-school students were “victims”, but that would be weak tea indeed. Mr Savage is one person, not a movement, and of course those students whom he gave the vapours were free to leave. Not everyone has such freedom. Gay teens, not Christian teens, kill themselves at higher rates than the general populace. Nobody calls Christianity an abomination. One blogger accused Mr Savage of “Christian-bashing” for pointing out the Bible’s position on slavery. A writer for a Focus on the Family site said that “using profanity to deride the Bible…is obviously a form of bullying and name-calling.” In fact it is neither: Mr Savage, however intemperate his language, was arguing, not name-calling. That is a crucial distinction, and one that too often eludes the showily devout. If the Bible is in fact the word of God it can survive a few arguments about context and application.

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This is never good advice. But pundits cannot seem to stop giving it. Matthew Yglesias long ago dubbed this error the “pundit’s fallacy”, which he defined as “the belief that what a politician needs to do to improve his or her political standing is do what the pundit wants substantively”. Robert Reich, a former secretary of labour (pictured), offers in the San Francisco Chronicle an open letter to the president the whole of which amounts to an audacious, extended example of Mr Yglesias’ fallacy.

Mr Reich presents his progressive wish list as “a clear, bold strategy for boosting the economy” capable of leaving the too-close-for-comfort Mitt Romney in the dust. Yet he offers no evidence whatsoever to the effect that “forcing banks to help distressed homeowners, stopping oil speculation, boosting spending until unemployment drops to 5 percent and fighting to ensure economic gains are widely shared” constitute a winning strategy. I’m fairly confident Mr Obama will adopt few of Mr Reich’s recommendations, and little of his rhetoric. Why not? Does Mr Reich know something Mr Obama doesn’t? No. Indeed, Mr Obama knows a great deal Mr Reich doesn’t. He has a whole horde of public-opinion professionals constantly monitoring the disposition of the American electorate. The difference between Mr Obama’s actual strategy and the one tendered by Mr Reich, a putative ally, will stand as a measure of the ineptness of Mr Reich’s advice. My question is, why do pundits waste our time with this stuff?

Does Mr Reich really believe that if only the president came out loud and proud in favour of his recommended proposals, the voting public would rally to his banner? Or maybe he believes that arguing in favour of a strategy that would probably be ruinous were the president to actually adopt it will nevertheless move public-opinion marginally in the direction of his preferences, and that eventually, if he keeps flogging this wish list, voters will begin to come around, and this will one day become a viable platform. Both possibilities seem unlikely to me. The only way I can see Mr Reich actually helping Mr Obama is by making him look moderate in comparison. Is that what he’s trying to do? Again, I doubt it. So what’s he up to? Surely it’s more than mere posturing.

E.L. Doctorow, a famous novelist, perpetrates in the pages of the New York Times a close cousin to the pundit’s fallacy. Mr Doctorow offers a satirical primer for national ruin, for “unexceptionalism”, which of course consists entirely of rightward developments in American politics he personally happens to deplore. Mr Doctorow avoids the fallacy of suggesting that a political programme opposed to these developments would be successful. Yet a related fallacy remains. Mr Doctorow’s not very clever conceit is that because America has failed to avoid all those things he finds especially wretched, it has been rendered “indistinguishable from the impoverished, traditionally undemocratic, brutal or catatonic countries of the world”. That is to say, America’s undoing is a direct consequence of the country having failed to successfully oppose what the author opposes. This is perhaps even more ludicrous than Mr Reich’s egocentric plan for Mr Obama’s triumph. If one spends just a few minutes looking at indices of human development, economic and political liberty, corruption, level of democratisation, and so on, one finds America rates rather highly. Despite America’s many egregious failings, it is rather harder to distinguish it from the rich, democratic, gentle or vigorous countries of the world. If America has become a plutocratic, jackbooted, war criminal, the correct conclusion to draw is that America makes plutocracy, jackboots and war crime look surprisingly decent. The problem with all the things Mr Doctorow laments had better not be that they have turned the country into some kind of authoritarian banana republic, because they haven’t. Conversely, if America were to do everything Mr Doctorow enthusiastically favours (I bet he reads Mr Reich with pleasure), it probably wouldn’t turn out quite as well as he imagines.

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Mokhtar Trifi, president of the Tunisian League for the Defense of Human Rights, was extremely cheerful when we met for lunch recently. In a deliciously cool restaurant on a very hot day, he regaled me with stories of what happened after our last lunch, in February 2007. Following that meeting, I had written a column in which I quoted him asking me, in effect, why Americans did not promote democracy in Tunisia.

Violent street demonstrations, followed by the toppling of a dictator, are an exhilarating way to bring democracy to an authoritarian society. They are not, however, the best way to bring democracy to an authoritarian society.

Violent street demonstrations, followed by the toppling of a dictator, are an exhilarating way to bring democracy to an authoritarian society. They are not, however, the best way to bring democracy to an authoritarian society.

Itas Europe where democracy is in headlong retreat. There, the leaders of the continentas largest nations a German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy a have asked their fellow European leaders to relinquish control of their national budgets to unelected European Union technocrats and judges. Any nation whose budget deficit exceeds 3 percent of its gross domestic product will face (as yet unspecified) financial sanctions, which can be suspended only by a supermajority of other E.U. member nationsa leaders.

To the American ear, these questions sound bizarre. Capitalism and democracy are bound together like Siamese twins, are they not? That was our mantra during the Cold War, when it was abundantly clear that communism and democracy were incompatible. After the Cold War ended, though, things grew murkier. Recall that virtually every U.S. chief executive and every U.S. president (two Bushes and one Clinton, in particular) told us that bringing capitalism to China would democratize China.